


anchor

by webbyrat



Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 3
Genre: F/M, Fluff, Holding Hands, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-30
Updated: 2019-01-30
Packaged: 2019-10-19 06:10:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 887
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17595926
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/webbyrat/pseuds/webbyrat
Summary: The Lone Wanderer’s relationship with Gob, in less than 900 words.





	anchor

He’s sitting on the rooftop, smoking a cigarette and gazing thoughtfully out at the stars, when she appears beside him.

His dirty gray t-shirt and jeans are pleasantly familiar.

His presence is calmness and kindness, a welcome back after a long day’s work.

She tries not to stare too much at the exposed muscles of his arms. The flesh is withered and rough, ropey chords pulled tight around his biceps. There is a grace in the way he rests his wrist against a knee, smoke plume rising from the cigarette, orange glow around his knuckles illuminating ragged digits. If he saw her looking, he’d get the wrong idea. He’s so sure she must find him repulsive, but that couldn’t be further from the truth.

They’ve known each other for about three weeks now, although she’s been in and out of town.

She’s back from reaching GNR; her quest to track down her father seems like a greater undertaking than she’d expected, and countless questions flit about her head like moths.

Her hair is lighter, bleached by the sun, and freckles now dot her rosy cheeks.

There is a new fire in her eyes.

He regards her over his shoulder, rotten lips slipping into a lopsided grin that makes her stomach do somersaults.

Tamping down on the blush that is threatening to creep from her ears to her face, she takes a seat companionably by his side.

Conversation springs up naturally.

He flinches when she asks for a puff of his cigarette—awkwardly passing it to her, trying not to touch her as he does 

Tries not to audibly gulp as she raises the cigarette to her lips.

She puffs for a moment before sputtering on the smoke, and he almost reaches reflexively to pat her on the back as she coughs, but he catches himself.

She notices both times, his reluctance to touch her. Wonders why she wishes he would...

After her brief coughing fit, she sips from her canteen and they resume their relaxed camaraderie, even laughing at her inexperience with smoking.

She slips into scientist mode, remarking on the harmful effects of tobacco. The highly complex words, out of her mouth, always surprise him; she has such an innocence, inexperience personified, that he forgets how skilled she is in certain areas.

He self-deprecates, he’s beyond caring about something like that. She worries that her comments were insensitive, wishes he wouldn’t put himself down quite so much.

The conversation drifts easily back into comfortable, and she is once again reminded of his calming presence.

His eyes, milky blue, once seemed so distant. Hazy. Now she sees that they sparkle when he laughs. 

His face, overall, is less other. She has seen more like him now. He is no longer unprecedented, unexpected. Her understanding of life outside the vault is ever-expanding, and ghouls now have a place within her mental framework.

But although his irradiated condition has become almost commonplace in her mind, she finds that her gaze is no less drawn to him than it once was. He may no longer be unprecedented, but he never fails to leave her mesmerized. He isn’t just any ghoul, and she’s slowly beginning to realize that it’s been that way from the start.

They joke around, and she decides to tease him, wobbling as if she’s losing her balance atop the roof.

Finally, he touches her—gripping her upper arm in reflex, and before he can pull away she covers his hand with her own.

His skin is like leather, ragged but smooth. Her laugh catches in her throat, and heat rises up her neck.

But then she sees the look in his eye—fear?—and lets go.

“Do you… dislike being touched? Or… does it hurt?”

He’s taken aback, but eventually explains.

No one wants to be touched by a ghoul.

They sit in the quiet, her dwelling on the information as he rolls the cigarette awkwardly between his fingers.

She watches him in her peripheral, considering his words, weighing them against everything else that she knows to be true.

His gentle hands, unsteady as they toy with the cigarette. Kind hands. Hands that passed her free drinks when she was broke. Picked up and dusted off her belongings when Jericho overturned her rucksack. Patched up her jacket when it was nearly destroyed by a yao guai.

She thinks back to the way they fluttered over her arm after a raider attack, so full of tenderness and concern, but ended up passing the medkit to Nova instead.

And then, as softly and non-threateningly as she can, she covers his hand with her own.

“I do,” her silence says. His shaky fingers are an anchor in a vast wasteland of uncertainty.

He feels his heart catch in his throat, but neither one looks at the other. Her soft palm against his ruined skin, the dull glow of his cigarette—it takes him a moment before his hand closes around hers, as if she hadn’t just bestowed on him the single greatest act of humanity he’s experienced in years...

They merely lapse into a tranquil silence, slowly relaxing into one another’s touch.

The camaraderie is restored, and she feels a new sense of stability.

But somehow, with that one simple action, he senses that something massive has shifted between them...

**Author's Note:**

> Something short I wrote while working on a longer piece about the same characters. Let me know what you think, what you liked, and what I should work on.
> 
> Thank you so much for reading!


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